Peachtree Road (2 page)

For all its homogeneity, it is an eccentric place, and I think that is why I am so fond of it. I can just hear my mother, who lies here, refuting that: “What a thing to say, Shep.

These are our own people. The funny people are all at Ar-lington.” But Oakland has bite and particu 6 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

larity and an air of raffish festivity to it, an orneriness that calls out to me, my mother notwithstanding. Among its ubiquitous angels and lugubrious inscriptions are the graven images of the venality and pragmatism that are the soul of this city, and their robustness bids to far outlive the crumbling cherubim and the soot-weeping eggs and darts. One progenitor of a prominent family has his Ph.D. inscribed on his mausoleum. Another has had replicated on his the facade of his fine Greek Revival earthly mansion, complete with street number, lest anyone confuse it with someone else’s.

My favorite has always been that of the Smith family, one of whose members, a Jasper N., had himself carved life-size and set foursquare atop his mausoleum, hat on knee, gazing to the northeast at the fine view to be had of the city. In life, local legend says, Jasper refused to wear a tie, and in death he has not capitulated. That he gazes now, not at the city’s skyline, but at the Martin Luther King Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Station and the new Piggyback Rail facility of the old Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill, does not seem to disturb him. He can no longer see Cabbagetown, the rank warren of old wooden shanties that grew up around the mill, and for that he may be grateful. I would be, profoundly. I have not seen Cabbagetown since a bitter cold day more than twenty-five years ago, and after today, I will not willingly come this near to it again, not until it is my turn to take up residence at Oakland. Cabbagetown was the catalyst that finished transforming me into what is known, euphemistically, as a recluse, though it by no means precipitated the journey. I suppose you might say I was genetically pro-grammed for that.

The Bondurant mausoleum, my own family’s port of em-barkation, lies on the crest of one of Oakland’s many hills, shaded by a giant magnolia and a leaning, fruitless old holly.

It is unprepossessing as the mau

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soleums there go, as spare and chaste and linear as the old scholar, my grandfather, who erected it. But it has a magnificent situation, being adjacent to the site of the long-ago mayor’s house from which General John B. Hood watched the Battle of Atlanta. Why that exercise in ignominy should so please my family I have never understood, but it did, especially my mother. Not herself a native Atlantan, she could and always did manage a tear when we visited the plot, and she would always say, “I can actually see the smoke and flames and hear the cannon. It just smites my heart.”

“Your heart gets itself smitten over some pretty odd things,”

my father said on one of those occasions.

“We’d all be better off if yours got smitten over anything at all,” she replied.

I can see in retrospect that both of them were right.

Now, over the hulking carcass of the MARTA station and the dreary jumble of the rail yards, you can see the towers of commerce that have made us the hub of the Sunbelt, the undisputed capital of the Southeast, the crossroads, as it were, of the country: a grinding, jostling, hustling megalopol-is of nearly three million people in a vast metropolitan area encompassing eighteen counties, spread out on our high green Piedmont plain under a stinking canopy of dull bronze, cupped between Kennesaw Mountain to the west, Stone Mountain to the east, the foothills of the Blue Ridge to the north, and still seeping south like the yolk of an undercooked egg.

Some of our downtown and midtown structures—the Trust Company of Georgia Tower, the First National Bank Building, the Georgia-Pacific Building, the Westin-Peachtree Plaza, the bone-white spires of Peachtree Center, the IBM Building—are very tall. That, to my eye, is all they are: tall. They scrabble and paw at the sky like pale, thin, unformed adolescent fingers. They are without distinction, except for their much-vaunted height.

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They are abrupt and nervous. It is a nervous skyline. The jangled skyscrapers do not let the observer forget that it was not the deep, rich arteries of the slow old rivers, but the thin, jackrabbity, stinking, robust veins of the railroads that were, for Atlanta, both nourishment and metaphor. From the very beginning, it was destined—or doomed, depending on your point of view—to be a business town.

And it’s a money town. Oh, very much a money town.

Like height, money is the other conspicuous thing that we have. My lifelong friend Charlie Gentry told me once, at a fund-raising luncheon at the Commerce Club before I stopped going out, “Money is the aristocracy in this town, no matter what you hear at the Driving Club. Money and property. It sure as hell isn’t the old families. None of us were here more than a hundred and fifty years ago. There wasn’t even an outhouse to piss in until then. And the few of us who have been here since the beginning came from somewhere else—Savannah or Charleston or Richmond, where they really know about old. No wonder we holler so about gumption and guts. It’s what we have instead of blue blood.”

Charlie, God love him. He was right, of course. He would know. Without any real money himself, he became one of the quintessential money and power brokers in the city. Most of us, plus the tackpots and the Texans and the Arabs we purport to scorn, came courting Charlie Gentry sooner or later. He took it in his stride and did his best for us, understanding precisely from whence we came. Money and business is and always was our ethos. Not creativity or artistic sensibility or even charming, cultivated decadence. Just business. In Atlanta, if it is good for business, it is as good as done.

I have never particularly liked that about Atlanta, but I concede that it has given us an extraordinary vigor, and I have certainly feasted on its fruits. I am not PEACHTREE ROAD / 9

ungrateful, just unengaged. Atlanta has never sung to me.

One of the deepest bonds I shared with Lucy was the way we both felt about the city: Neither of us liked it very much, but neither of us wanted to leave it, either. I remember once, late into the cataclysmic sixties, when she asked me why I stayed, I surprised myself with quite a succinct little précis:

“It’s passionless, calculating, selfsatisfied, intolerant, insensitive, uncultivated, vulgar, even soulless…but it’s alive! God, Lucy, the energy in this town! And it’s just so beautiful, parts of it. But mostly, it’s mine. It’s what I know. It’s the card I drew; it’s what I’m invested in. I
know
this place. I’d never know another place or other people like I do this.”

“Is knowing so important?” Lucy asked.

“Yes,” I said. “For some reason, knowing is everything.”

“Hell, Gibby,” Lucy said. “Knowing doesn’t amount to shit. It doesn’t change the way things are.”

Lucy was early, and ever, a realist.

At a party once, again in those days when I was still going out, a smart, thin woman with a deep, leathery tan and the unmistakable smack of that New York-Palm Beach axis in her voice asked me, discontentedly, where you had to go to find Old Atlanta.

“They certainly aren’t at any of the parties I’ve been to, and I’ve been to every decent party this entire winter,” she said.

I looked around the drawing room of the big house, a beetling ersatz Norman in one of those frightening developments out on the river where florists’ and caterers’ trucks are lost by the thousands. The Chattahoochee Triangle, we call it. Everybody there was what the old ladies in my crowd would call tackpots, and every other one seemed to be a lawyer. I didn’t know anybody; I had come with clever, Jewish Marty Fox, whom I had just hired to help me sort out my father’s estate, and whom I

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liked enormously. The talk of deals and money had bored me, but the hors d’oeuvres were spectacular, and the host had provided a fleet of minivans to shuttle guests from their cars to the house, and there was more décolletage in the room than I had ever seen, except at the strip shows we used to sneak into Manhattan from Princeton to see.

“Funerals,” I said. “Most especially funerals at Saint Philip’s or All Saints or Saint Luke’s. Or Oakland Cemetery.”

“You mean they’re all dead?” she said, staring at me belligerently, to see if I was making fun of her. I was not.

“No. I mean the only time I ever see what I guess you’d call Old Atlanta all together in a group is at a funeral or beside somebody’s grave at Oakland.”

“Or at the Driving Club or the Capital City Club or Brookhaven,” I did not say. The woman would never find out for herself. Those were still the days when new money, no matter how much there was of it, didn’t get into the older clubs. This, like almost everything else, has changed now, of course, and it’s one change of which I heartily approve—or would, if I still went to the clubs. Those pretackpot days at the Piedmont Driving Club were among the most astoundingly boring in the history of the world.

I had spoken the truth to the leathery lady, however fa-cetiously. There we all were this afternoon: Old Atlanta en masse, or what passes for it. The quick of it, as well as the dead. A dwindling handful of men and women, young and old, who had lived within a four-mile radius of each other all their lives; grown up together, gone to school and college together, flirted and danced with and courted and married each other, godparented each other’s children, laughed and wept and partied with each other, loved and sometimes hated each other, mourned and buried each other. Rich, or what the world calls rich,

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a good many of them. Incomprehensibly rich, a few of them.

Once, all-powerful in the smaller arena that was the Atlanta of their prime.

There beside Lucy’s grave today we had a past and present mayor, a governor, an ex-governor, a United States senator; men who had built family mercantile and service businesses into international concerns, men who had made literally millions from Coca-Cola, either directly or indirectly, men who had dramatically altered the face of the South and in some cases the nation with their monolithic urban and suburban developments; men who had, almost single-handedly or in concert with five or six of their peers, brought to the city, in the firestorm decade of the sixties, a major league sports arena, five professional sports teams, a great, dead-white marble arts center and a world-famous conductor to inhabit it, a world-class international airport, a state-of-theart rapid transit system, a freeway system to boggle the mind, unparalleled convention facilities and the people to fill them—and the peacefully integrated school system that lured in the industry to fuel it all.

They are a superannuated, largely toothless pride of old lions whose days of glory are past, perhaps, but their turf is still that cloistered world for which they wrought everything, and it is still inviolable, even if it is shrunken now, and teeters sometimes on its foundations. And they still move with grace and ease in it.

And their wives, old now, too, but still chic in the soft, pastel way of their primes, and their widows; equally smart, equally erect and slender and expensively and unobtrusively dressed—all there. And their sons and daughters: us, my crowd, Lucy’s and my contemporaries, our own ranks thinned and wounded, our faces surprised with middle age.

And even their grandchildren, a few of them. Our children.

I saw Sarah Gentry’s two quicksilver daughters, and Little Lady Rawson’s lone eighteen-year-12 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

old Circe, and Lelia Cheatham’s tall, gangling sons. And Lucy’s daughter, Malory, stricken and smeared with grief but still looking so heartstoppingly like her mother in her own first youth and slender, smoky beauty that my eyes stung with it. Malory, standing for the moment with the other women, apart, as they always seem to be in groups, from the closed ranks of their men. Malory…

The women were an attractive lot, I thought, not for the first time. They were all still soft-faced, soft-voiced, poised, and they talked today in low voices with each other, smiling sometimes over at their men. Without being in the least physically similar, they gave an impression of agreeable sameness. I knew, of course, that they were as varied as the women in any comparable peer group; that the sameness was merely protective coloration, a softly buffed armor they acquired along with their charm bracelets and white debut frocks when they came of age in the big old houses off Peachtree Road.

My eye caught a flash of red in all the quiet taupes and navies, and I grinned involuntarily at the openly defiant scarlet chiffon scarf around the strongly modeled brown throat of Sarah Cameron Gentry. None of the girls in our crowd had liked Lucy worth a damn, and Sarah, of all of them, had had good reason. Too well bred to rejoice on this day, Sarah was nevertheless flying all her flags. Small, staunch, perfectly made Sarah, also my friend from infancy, and once, more than friend. In an earlier time, I might have married Sarah, and thus been saved. In an earlier time, and a better one…. Sarah caught my eye and gave me a slow amber wink. Her dark head is threaded now with gray, but it is still the springy, cropped tumble of mahogany curls that she has worn since girlhood. She always kept it short for her swimming and diving. Her body still retains its fine, shapely, flat athlete’s muscles, and I still remember with pleasure the pearly sheen of baby oil and iodine on her golden back, PEACHTREE ROAD / 13

and the music and grace of her racing dives off the board at the Driving Club pool.

I wondered if Sarah still dived and swam. I have not been to the club for a very long time.

Over to the left of the women, us. That most endangered of species, the masculine remnants of Old Atlanta, far out-numbered even in middle age by our widows and daughters.

Speaking to each other in that peculiar shorthand of ours that marks and dates and explains us: “How are you, suh?”

“Good to see you, suh.” That “suh” is not politesse; it is our crowd’s familiar. We use it among ourselves as the French do their familiar “tu.”